Cheerios Challenge: 7,000 Instagram Posts Show People Piling Cheerios On Babies And Animals
As online challenges go, the so-called “Cheerios Challenge” doesn’t seem as dangerous as other challenges that have graced social media during the past few years. But that doesn’t mean the challenge, which finds people stacking Cheerios on sleeping infants or animals or adults, doesn’t have its detractors. Others find it funny and cute to watch the lighthearted videos or view photos of stacks of Cheerios piled atop cute babies in light of all the other more serious news going on these days.
This challenge is one that continues to grow, as proven by the growing #Cheeriochallenge hashtag on Instagram, which has nearly 7,000 posts as of this writing. Some of those Instagram posts are ones like the video below, which shows a baby sleeping while Cheerios are being piled on the baby’s head.
The #Cheerioschallenge hashtag, with “Cheerio” pluralized to “Cheerios,” adds more than 1,000 more posts on Instagram showing off the challenge, bringing the total amount of images and videos under those Cheerios-related posts to more than 7,000 on the social media website.
A few comments beneath the below video reflect the fact that some people empathize with the sleeping baby, wanting the child to be left alone. Others laugh at the lighthearted nature of attempting to stack Cheerios on a sleeping infant, with some comments from folks who write they’ve attempted the same challenge but that their baby twitched, causing the Cheerios to fall away.
As reported by CNN, the challenge was started by Patrick Quinn, who began piling Cheerios on the nose of his 3-week-old son, Maxton.
Maxton had fallen asleep on Patrick, and the move caused Quinn to feel trapped, needing something to entertain him as his little baby slept. There were Cheerios nearby, so Quinn grabbed them to see if he could get at least one of the Cheerios to remain on Maxton’s nose as the baby slept blissfully.
When the dad successfully balanced one of the Cheerios on Maxton’s nose, Quinn continued until he was able to get five Cheerios stacked on his son’s nose.
Quinn’s photos of his success in piling Cheerios on his baby’s nose gave birth to the “Cheerio Challenge” or “Cheerios Challenge,” as it were. Quinn admitted that it took some time to get that many Cheerios piled onto his baby’s nose — and not necessarily because the baby moved, but because the sight of Cheerios piled atop his son’s nose sent the dad into peals of laughter that made him shake and cause the Cheerios to fall.
“I’d take a picture but then I’d start laughing and it’d topple over. So I’d start again, take a picture and it’d topple over. The highest I got to is five.”
After birthing the challenge with Cheerios, the Orange County dad discovered that others were competing with his photos online in order to stack their own towers of Cheerios on sleeping babies.
As long as the Cheerios don’t fall into the baby’s mouth or any other concerns about objectifying a sleeping baby come to the forefront, this is one challenge that seems relatively safe. While most parents are so happy to get a break during the time when their babies are asleep — and likely wouldn’t risk doing anything to wake them — some are taking on the challenge and getting handfuls of Cheerios ready when their babies fall asleep.
Some of the reactions to the challenge involving Cheerios and babies from social media can be read below.
4,320 minutes old roughly 4,320 Cheerios. Don't show my wife please. It's a glass vase. #CheerioChallenge #LifeofDad pic.twitter.com/oGaswG5PIA
— Dusty (@DustinGiebel) June 18, 2016
“That moment when boredom and the Internet meet…#CheeriosChallenge accepted.”
“Oh man I’d be too afraid to wake my sleeping baby up when I topple the tower down!”
[Image via Shutterstock]
